Link Banana

Gems Sty points to a very cool way to browse Flickr photos: by color. It even lets you do many colors at once.

A few months ago, a team from Rensselaer and Rice Universities made a surface the blackest black that was ever called black.

(via kottke)

Because sometimes the gentle therapy of turning virtual pages of solid color is all you want to do.

(via MetaFilter)

Remember this? Well, people have been working on ways to revisualize the color names that Dolores Lab crowd-sourced. Color Flower is my favorite, but the others are nice too.

Pretty interesting experiment: show people a random color and ask them to name it. The result certainly look impressive.

Also of note: the same guys found that Sports Illustrated covers feature more (American) football and black folks than they did in the past.

(via Magnetbox)

Alison Buckholtz has a interesting look into the world of a synesthete — herself. Synthesia, which has always fascinated me, it essentially the mixing of senses. Like, as Buckholtz describes, numbers having innate colors.

I didn’t worry about colors for many years, and though I retained all of my lifelong synesthetic associations, I only rarely generated new ones. Occasionally, I met a person whose color was obvious and unmistakable, and I couldn’t shake the connection. In fact, I named my daughter Esther, in part, because her color matched her name, which to me is pink. Even now it brings me deep aesthetic and emotional satisfaction to know that she and her name are so well-paired.

Finally, in my early 30s, I read a short piece on synesthesia in a scientific journal. Decades of tension I never knew I’d carried instantly lifted. My freakishness had a name. And actually, I wasn’t a freak at all. I wasn’t the only one perceiving my surroundings in technicolor. I recognized myself in sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph.